Interview by Neshy Denton

Tristes Tropiques was Andrew Pekler’s first album to catch my attention. It felt like a mosaic of gurgling substance, pouring meaning into the intangible. This interview peers into his world, where he wanders through the experimental side of music and sifts through the ambient realm where sound and silence intertwine. His relationship with nature shapes the profound connection discovered in the joy of recording places. Exploring the concept of spatial environments, he recognises the invisible aspects of a soundscape as more present than ever. By embracing detail, he cultivates a respect for ‘space,’ allowing it to breathe and resonate rather than become overwhelmed with layered noise.
Instruments, modular synths, and raw field recordings have been waxing his pieces together since his first releases in the 90s in Germany. His arrival in Heidelberg exposed him to the local tones of electronic music. His journey into music production was officially unpacked through a 4-track cassette recorder, and he had a chance encounter with Source Records after passing around some of his experimental tapes at the time. His first release was Sad Rockets, a product of those early days spent in his student flat.
Listen to his tracks, and you’ll engage with both tragedy and equanimity. Though not always obvious, his landscapes are dialogues between himself and the not-so-accidental sounds that emerge in the process. The interaction that captured most listeners’ attention was one of an ethnographic approach: Sounds From Phantom Islands. What we initially interpreted as an exploration of the islands’ ghostly past reveals itself as a deeper reflection on the tragedy of colonialism, Pekler explains more specifically in the following interview.
I’ve heard the likes of quirkiness, peace, reflection and an edge to a certain stoicism. The introspective curiosity of the unknown and a deep meditation of the known. From the one-hour track Khao Sok Extension, which stretches and probes field recordings from the Thailand park to his For Lovers Only/ Rain Suite album dedicated to a romantic softness. On this one, he places the textural hum under different tones of crackling instruments and lets the melodies speak for themselves.
Not only does Pekler’s discography lengthen into a sphere of intricate styles and intonations, but his background involves the same variety—the emigration from the then Soviet Union to the US and the eventual landing in Germany, where he still resides today. He is a born observer whose work holds an ongoing conversation with the world around him. As he edges on the subtle boundaries of his synthesised atmospheres, his music invites the listener into a space where sound resonates within a deeply meditative and immersive experience.




You’ve spoken about allocating space to sounds, mentioning specifically the quote “reduce to the max.” How do you decide how much “space” a sound needs?
That’s an interesting way to put it. I don’t think I consider it from that direction. Well, in sonic terms, space is negative. Whilst putting a sound into a space, I have to look at how much sound has to be there or be removed. When I am working with sounds, be they fragments of sound recordings that I am using, samples from other music or from my recordings, or something I have synthesised or recorded from the natural world, usually, there’s spatiality already in the sound.
For example, if you record a room, the sound of a room is already in the reverberations or within the resonations of the recording. The space is already implied in my sound, becoming part of the palette. The pleasure of working with sound becomes the interrogation of how to amplify this or contrast that spatiality with something that has a different character and can resonate interestingly. It’s difficult to talk about this without sound examples. But “reduce to the max” is always at the back of my mind and has become my motto. Because it is so easy just to keep adding things. When you see musicians’ available tools today, you realise how easy it is to add and add. When I listen back to what I’ve done, I am most pleased with the ones that have the least in them.
So, I guess you’ve had to subtract elements from a piece because they overcrowded the emotional or auditory space you created?
Yes. I often go back on things I’ve done and think, why haven’t I learned this lesson over the years? Just don’t put certain things in the first place. I guess it is a necessary path to go down, to go through the building process and then learn how to subtract. Stripping back has turned out to be the final way.
When I listen to Khao Sok, it feels both meditative and immersive. What drew you to this specific environment, which is the subject of an almost one-hour track?
The honest reply is very mundane and very prosaic. Khao Sok is the name of a park in Thailand. I went there with my family on a holiday, as people do. We went in February, and the kids were young enough to get out of Kindergarten. An interesting feature of Khao Sok is this artificial lake. It was produced because some waterways were dammed. It’s pretty recent, so there’s some interesting geography there.
It was my first time in a tropical rainforest, and you always hear about these places being very loud. Not only is it very extreme and exceptional, visually and climate-wise, in its abundance of flora and fauna, but sonically, it is also very dense. It changes throughout the day. There’s a different combination of sounds at night than during the day. There’s this so-called dawn chorus; it is the most intense and loudest moment just before dawn.
All the different species are going at it at the same time. I was camping there and started recording, logging it like a notebook, and ended up with many fragmentary recordings. It was initially for myself as a snapshot of the park’s soundscapes.
A couple of years later, I started playing around with these recordings, and the first thing I did when I checked a recording was to start playing with the speed and the pitch. When you take these recordings, you can find some very high-pitched sounds from birds. Take these down two octaves and slow them down – all these melodic, rhythmic and harmonic patterns emerge. Because they’ve been brought down to a more human-comprehending frequency band, you realise that occasionally, all the buzzing, whirring, and clicking have the most interesting melodies.
It is not strictly rhythmic but periodic in a way of repeating motifs. You also discover some ghostly artifacts when you slow the recordings because the space changes pace and becomes a syrupy and echoey world. I found myself listening to these fragments on a loop. These recordings were only in pieces of about 15 seconds, and they doubled or quadrupled when the pace changed. I started stitching these fragments together for my enjoyment. At some point, I used part of this as an interlude in an album and later got approached by a label asking me if I had any field recording-based material I would be interested in publishing. So, that is how I initially thought of this private tropical rainforest sound I had built for myself.
However, this is not the first release you’ve worked with field recordings.
It’s the only one that has field recordings. Without anything added. I mean, I’ve manipulated and stitched things together, pitched and slowed. So, it does not accurately represent what the park would sound like if you were to go.
Given that your wife is an ethnographer, do you see parallels between how ethnographers document cultures and how you document or imagine sonic environments?
In a very roundabout way, yes. I don’t necessarily see myself as someone who is documenting anything. This leads back to ethnography because, in its original manifestation in the 20th century, it claimed to document a world of various people’s lives, mainly non-European. They believed that something could be documented without any interference from the person doing the documentation. It has become more of an interaction rather than the latter.
There is a strict disagreement between the subject of study and the modern, self-critical approach to ethnography. And it has been one of more interaction and collaboration. In that sense, I feel there are some similarities. Because I don’t feel like I’m documenting anything when I’m working with sound from the environment or things that come from synths and sounds I make. I always feel like I collaborate with actual materials.
I come up with something, hear something, or consider something, and if it is going well,l there always is a suggestion from them of what I should do with them, from how they should be combined, repeated, reduced or enhanced.
Would you even say it could be an interpretation and an interaction?
I don’t even think I am interpreting, either. It is the interaction between equal parties. The way that I most enjoy making music, on the one hand, is playing music with other people, which is the essential interaction within music-making. When I am on my own, I set up a semi-autonomous system with my instruments. It is doing things, making sound, and modulating itself, and I can influence the direction in which it is going. I can shut things off and turn things on.
The most interesting, productive and enjoyable way of working is interacting with this semi-autonomous system that is going on its own and keeps generating sound events and sequences without me interfering. However, my interaction steers it towards a different direction.
I like how you allowed artists to reinvent some of your songs in your last release, Rain Revisited. What made you do this? Was it some sort of experiment?
This project, for example, was not entirely interactive. I asked two artists to re-interpret the tracks that I’d done. One of the artists was a duo called Salenta + Topu. They play acoustic instruments, piano and cello. They took the music as a melodic figure and improvised with it. They didn’t use any of the original material and used melodic ideas from my track. There was no direct interaction with them. They’d already listened to the album and had liked it. They sent back a track, which was half a cover and half an interpretation. The other was from Jamie Hodge, who did more of a classic remix. I sent him my recordings, and he re-synthesised a few things into different sounds. I chopped a few sequences up and added a few other things.
I’ve been in touch with Salenta + Topu and Jamie Hodge for a while. Salenta + Topu very kindly got in touch after the album had come out. They said they liked it – always something nice to hear from someone whose music you also appreciate. And at some point, I asked them. In Hodge’s case, I’ve always enjoyed his records. He has very few records from the 90s. He is one of these forgotten legends who made some very interesting and forward-thinking pieces for Richie Hawtin’s label back in the day. These are the first records that blended jazz sensibility into electronic music in a very particularly quirky way. His name at the time was “Born Under A Rhyming Planet”. Since then, he’s made very little music, which I’ve found shameful. So I was prodding him to do something again. He’s worked on stuff but has not released anything.
In Cover Versions, you observed people instinctively turning records to check the back despite them being identical. This sort of attention to detail is what initially drew me to you. Have you noticed other behavioural patterns in how audiences engage with your work?
I just found that very amusing. The people I had observed doing this realised what they were doing. Observing them observing themselves and coming to the same realisation was interesting. Often, people ask me about my recent project, Phantom Islands. I observed a variety of different interpretations of this specific album. You mentioned my partner’s work; she’s an ethnographer, and this Phantom Islands project grew out of her research and teaching project. She invited me to expand it into the musical and audio realm. Many people interpret it as a fun anomaly of history.
Navigational techniques were not as precise as they are now. S,o the world’s oceans have now been wholly charted and mapped. People were either mistaking certain islands for other islands or purposefully inventing islands to boost their reputation and acquire further commissions. People made navigators see something that was not an island but a fog bank or an iceberg. All these stories connected to this phenomenon of maps for hundreds of years without being proven to exist.
A lot of curiosity is connected, but the point that doesn’t seem to get across to listeners is that this is an artifact of a tragic colonist history. This happened in the period of European expansion beyond the world’s oceans—the exploitation and death of many indigenous people who were there before them. So, the phenomenon of Phantom Islands is partly colonialism and history. When people mention how fun and quirky the story is, they are disappointed to hear that the fun is spoiled because it is rooted in tragedy. This again points out the ongoing colonialism and subjugation which defines our world’s background. So, it is essentially rooted in those centuries of European exploration.
You’ve recently started working with visual art. How do you combine this with your music?
It is not a primary focus but more of an afterthought. I do media work when needed. I like accompanying my live performances with a video projection to create an album cover. If I had more time, I would do more visuals because I am interested in photography and video. However, I do not plan on being an actual visual artist.
Are there any non-musical artists whose work has inspired you?
It is hard to pinpoint a direct channel between an artist and my work. I am a big fan of Nabokov. I always go back to him. His most famous novel is Lolita. He wrote several other more interesting pieces because Lolita is quite sensational. The book became internationally renowned, and the word Lolita became its own term. He was a very interesting writer because he used very playful language and was also very smart. His language is sympathetic.
His biography is fascinating; he was an emigrant from Russia. His aristocratic family escaped during the Russian Revolution and spent some time in Germany in the 20s. He’s written in English, German and Russian so he is well educated as a journalist. In the 30s, he went to the United States to teach literature and philosophy. He continued to write until the mid-70s when he died.
One thing that runs throughout his work is this playful use of language. He is very observant of the different registers in different people’s languages due to their backgrounds or locations. His characters are very rich and alive. The form of his novels is very subverted, and his very first was a component of this idea: you’re reading an unreliable narrator from the point of view of a certain person.
You’ll have the events that the narrator is conveying that don’t align with the facts of the matter you’re getting from the rest of the book. You start realising that the narrator of this book is not telling the truth and that there are more layers than you initially thought. It’s a device I like from Nabokov.
Do you feel like you resonate with him, having emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States yourself?
Yes, I do a little bit. But he lived in a different time. He often writes about emigres with a slightly different background from those they are surrounded by.
So, could you share any projects you’ve envisioned but haven’t yet pursued?
Nothing sensational. I’ve been half-finished with an album for six months. I just don’t have much time to work on music. I have another job and a family to take care of. I am also very slow when working on music. Even after all these years, I tend not to be very efficient with my time. I haven’t acquired any better habits. I seem to go through the process of working on something, adding too much and then going back to it to extract a bunch of stuff again. I guess I should find a process where I could go a bit faster.
What’s your chief enemy of creativity?
I think the chief enemy is also the chief supporter. I guess it’s influencing. There’s a lot of music that I like, that I find admirable in the way that it’s made, the way that it’s structured and presented. But I have to be careful not to emulate any of these things.
It brings me further away than my authentic expression. Influences are necessary to show one what is possible; they are influential for a reason and point towards how something could be. The trick is to use it only as an approach instead of an emulation. I wonder what I would have made if I hadn’t had influences from the music I’ve heard. The lesson is to emulate the attitude of what is influencing instead of the actual music.
The idea of reducing to the max. The classic examples of this are dub and reggae. Every track is a lesson in reduction. Letting the sounds that exist in space with reverb and echo. For instance, I am influenced by that even though I do not make dub music. I learned a lesson from that kind of music by understanding the attitude of this making process and building up and stripping back as a compositional tool.
You couldn’t live without…
There are so many things you can’t live without, really. There’s a whole unseen support system in the psychological, social, economic, and political sense that is invisible to me as a white European. However, I find it necessary to put my hands on a music-making device; I couldn’t live without an instrument that I could manipulate tactilely. Put it that way. It could be a guitar, a modular synth, or a drum. It’s the ability to make sound directly through my hands, not through the medium of a screen. I also use it, but I find it necessary to touch the keys of a piano or the strings of a guitar, for instance.